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Global ‘selfies’ help create image of the planet on Earth Day

The 3.2 gigapixel Global Selfie mosaic, hosted by GigaPan, was made with 36,422 individual images that were posted to social media sites on or around Earth Day, April 22, 2014. Handout/NASAPhoto: Handout/NASA

That’s exactly what happened when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) asked people on Earth Day — April 22 — a simple question: Where are you on Earth right now?

Using social media, the U.S. space agency requested people answer with a “global selfie” and submit it, with a plan to use each one as a pixel in a mosaic image resembling what the Earth looked like that day from space.

NASA has now released the image online that allows a visitor to click and zoom in to different countries and view all 36,422 of the images up close.

It’s literally a trip around the world via people portraits.

From a distance, the mosaic looks the planet, partly covered in clouds and a little bit fuzzy, with the continents clearly visible.

But as you draw the planet image closer using the zoom tool, thousands of faces appear, some holding signs, others simply posing with friends and family, or in front of their favourite geography or architecture.

“Ciao NASA! Sono sulla Terra in questo momento (‘Hi NASA! I’m on Earth right now’),” says the sign a man is holding from Lugano, a city in southern Switzerland near the Italian border.

There are selfies from boardrooms, classrooms, minivans and deserts. People also submitted a plethora of pet selfies.

People on every continent — 113 countries and regions — responded and posted their global selfies. The pictures came from as far away as Antarctica, Yemen, Greenland to Micronesia, Maldives, Pakistan and Poland, using Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Flickr, NASA said on its website.

The mosaic was created after weeks of curating more than 50,000 submissions, whittling it down to the ones that were usable.

The “zoomable” 3,2 gigapixel image is hosted on the Web by GigaPan, a commercial spinoff of a research collaboration between a team of researchers at NASA and Carnegie Mellon University.

Views of each hemisphere on Earth Day 2014 were captured by satellite using infrared imaging.